Different planetary gears are already known from the prior art, for example from EP 0156067.
In principle, differential gears for automotive vehicles are known from DE 10156890 C1. A differential gear is disclosed for an automotive vehicle with a differential housing having a drive sprocket supported in a housing wall, in which a differential bolt is arranged with at least a rotatively mounted differential pinion that engages with a drive gear of a drive shaft mounted in the differential housing. The drive shaft is supported by at least a first bearing in the housing wall of the differential gear and/or the differential housing by means of at least one second bearing for the drive shaft, while the drive shaft has a common bearing bush for the first bearing serving as a shaft bearing of the drive shaft and the housing bearing of the differential housing.
A differential arrangement engaging with bevel gears is also known from U.S. Pat. No. 7,775,928.
Furthermore, a gear arrangement that engages with planetary wheels is known from DE 10 2009 017 397 A1. The gear arrangement introduced there relates to a differential gear with a drive-side wheel member, a first drive wheel that is rotatively fixed to a first driven axle, while a second drive wheel is rotatively fixed to a second driven axle, whereby between the first drive wheel and the second drive wheel, a gear assembly is provided for transmitting torque from the drive side wheel member to the first drive wheel and second drive wheel. The first drive wheel member in this case has the form of a first drive wheel with a bulge that is radially spaced from the first drive axle. The second drive member further has the form of a second drive wheel extending radially outwards from the second drive axle. Further, the bulge extends further away from the second drive wheel. The gear assembly is disposed in a space formed by the protrusion of the first drive wheel and the opposite region of the space formed by the second drive wheel.
Such planetary gears, which are designed as differential gears, may be formed as spur wheel differential gears as they are known, for example, from WO 2010/112366 A1. The spur wheel differential gear arrangement presented there, discloses the operational capability in an automotive vehicle. In this case, each toothed helical sun gear, planetary wheel and a hollow wheel are supported by a surrounding housing with bearings, so that the parallel sun gears are each coupled with parallel drive shafts. It is disclosed in this publication that frictional surfaces are disposed between the parallel sun gears and/or between the sun gears and the surrounding housing.
However, these known planetary gears have the disadvantage that they require a lot of axial space.